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big bang

You’ve Heard of the Big Bang? What About the “Big Bounce”?

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bounce - pixabay

In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Or at least, that’s what we’ve been told by physicists for the past several decades. But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be “very early” after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for … well, at least once, and possibly forever. Of course, before physicists … Read more

SCIENCE: How Will the Universe End?

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How will the universe end? “Not with a bang but with a whimper,” wrote the American poet T.S. Eliot regarding the end of the world. But if you want a more definite response, you’ll find that physicists have spent countless hours turning this question over in their minds, and have neatly fit the most plausible hypotheses into a few categories. “In textbooks and cosmology class, we learn there are three basic futures for the universe,” said Robert Caldwell, a cosmologist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire. In one scenario, the cosmos could continue to expand forever, with all matter … Read more

SCIENCE: What Happened Before the Big Bang?

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The Big Bang is commonly thought of as the start of it all: About 13.8 billion years ago, the observable universe went boom and expanded into being. But what were things like before the Big Bang?Short answer: We don’t know. Long answer: It could have been a lot of things, each mind-bending in its own way. The first thing to understand is what the Big Bang actually was. “The Big Bang is a moment in time, not a point in space,” said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of “The Big Picture: On … Read more

Did Time Run in Reverse Before the Big Bang?

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Like a mountain looming over a calm lake, it seems the universe may once have had a perfect mirror image. That’s the conclusion a team of Canadian scientists reached after extrapolating the laws of the universe both before and after the Big Bang. Physicists have a pretty good idea of the structure of the universe just a couple of seconds after the Big Bang, moving forward to today. In many ways, fundamental physics then worked as it does today. But experts have argued for decades about what happened in that first moment — when the tiny, infinitely dense speck of … Read more